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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



WHAT SHALL MAKE US WHOLE? 



WHAT SHALL MAKE US 
WHOLE ? 

OR 

THOUGHTS IN THE DIRECTION OF 

MAN'S SPIRITUAL AND PHYSICAL 

INTEGRITY. 



BY 



HELEN BIGELOW MERRIMAN. 





« MAR 21 f888 r 



/ 8" 



BOSTON: 
CUPPLES AND HURD, 

94 Boylston Street. 

i 888. 






Copyright, 7555, 

By H. B. Merriman. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



TO 

&nttetta ©ettrute ^xzwtx. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 

THIS essay was begun at the request 
of a few friends, and without any- 
thought of book-making. Its appearance 
in the present form is not intended to 
claim for it either completeness or per- 
manent value. It is at best but a rough 
and imperfect sketch of a spiritual pos- 
sibility now coming into the field of hu- 
man vision. It attempts only to fix a few 
points and establish a few relative values, 
in anticipation of the time when human 
research and experience shall complete 
the picture. 

As the essence of a sketch is its group- 
ing of details in order to handle them in 
their larger relations, so in this essay meta- 
physical terms are used with less regard 
to the distinctions between them than to 
their common aspect as expressing phases 
of the universal life. 



INTRODUCTION. 




WHAT SHALL MAKE US 
WHOLE? 



INTRODUCTION. 



TWO men paint the same landscape. 
One of them sees first the details, 
— the flowers and rocks of the fore- 
ground, the cattle, the individual trees; 
these he represents one after another 
with painstaking fidelity, and is surprised 
to find that the sum of them does not 
make a satisfactory picture. The other 
notes first the contrast between land and 
sky ; marks how the light falls broadly on 
the meadow, sweeps up one hillside, leav- 



1 6 What shall Make us Whole? 

itual as well as the physical being of man, 
and he will probably tell you that the spir- 
itual is too vague an element to be ad- 
mitted into his calculations in any practical 
way. He agrees, perhaps, that man's men- 
tal and spiritual condition must affect his 
physical health ; but he feels that the spir- 
itual realm is quite distinct from that in 
which he labors, and that its laws, if it have 
any, are too little understood to be relied 
on in a practical emergency. And yet, if 
God's will is the central controlling force 
of the universe, which it must be if God 
exists at all, man's relation to Him must 
transcend and include all other relations 
in which man stands, and must form not 
only a factor, but the prime factor in all 
life's problems. Any attempt to harmon- 
ize life's discordant elements must surely 
fail of complete success so long as this 
prime factor is left out. The physician 
confesses this when he uncovers his head 
to the mystery of life and death, and owns 



Introduction. 17 

that in this direction his art has limitations 
which he can never hope to transcend. 

Meanwhile some plain people, not over- 
burdened with scientific knowledge, remem- 
bering the miracles and mystic sayings of 
Christ, deeply convinced of the reality of 
unseen things, have here and there cher- 
ished the belief that in some way disease 
can be routed by spiritual weapons, and 
man made in the end so perfectly whole 
in body and spirit that disintegration and 
death will have no hold upon him. To- 
day these theories are set forth in a more 
coherent form than ever before, under such 
names as " Mental Healing " or " Mind 
Cure," " Faith Cure," " Christian Science," 
etc. 1 Faith is the essential element in them 
all; but the more thoughtful class have, 

1 These are all different phases of the same move- 
ment. " Christian Science " tends to magnify the indi- 
vidual. " Faith Cure " relies on God, without making 
much effort to understand the methods of His working. 
" Mind Cure " holds a wise course between the two, and 
is by far the most promising for future usefulness. 
2 



1 8 What shall Make us Whole? 

as a result of their faith, discerned certain 
spiritual laws which give solidity to their 
work, and go far to justify them in claim- 
ing for the new practice the name of a 
spiritual science. 

Faith leads us to turn towards something 
as yet unseen, but which we think may ex- 
ist. If the thing is really there, it becomes 
more and more apparent to us as we turn, 
so that gradually our faith is merged in be- 
lief and positive assurance. The mental 
— or, better, spiritual ■ — healers, starting 
with a profound faith that God is the great 
Reality, and that man, in virtue of his re- 
lation to God, is first and chiefly a spiritual 
being to be influenced most potently from 
the spiritual side, have had the courage 
of their convictions, and by surrendering 
themselves to this view of things and put- 
ting it into practice down to the smallest 
detail, they have achieved such success in 
healing as in the minds of many abun- 
dantly proves the Tightness of their as- 



Introduction. 19 

sumption, and transfers their practice from 
the uncertain realm of faith to the terra 
firma of established principles. 

The advance they have made is thus an 
ethical, one might almost say biological, 
rather than a merely intellectual one. The 
propositions which the teachers of Mental 
Healing advance with unquestioning faith, 
and in unusual terminology, are none other 
than the deepest spiritual truths of Chris- 
tianity. These truths are unfolding to 
man to-day in a thousand ways as never 
before, leading many persons to believe 
that we are on the verge of a new spirit- 
ual era, a blossoming of the whole age, a 
second coming of Christ in the hearts of 
his people. The special credit due to the 
Mind Cure is, that its disciples have dared 
to insist that these deepest spiritual truths 
shall become practical, operative, regnant, 
here and now. 

This is, after all, the greatest service that 
can be done for mankind, — to bring truth 



20 What shall Make us Whole ? 

out of the realm of the abstract, and 
incorporate it with daily life. It always 
requires great courage and faith to do this, 
and never more than now, when science 
has so exalted the truth of physical facts 
that spiritual truth, which often revolution- 
izes these facts, can scarcely get a hearing 
in some quarters. 

If the Mind Cure really heals the sick, it 
will soon have followers enough, and win 
its way in spite of all opposition; but in 
these early days, when it is struggling for 
recognition, it needs a word to show that 
its basis is one on which all who recognize 
the spiritual life can agree. The Church 
should welcome it as helping men to re- 
alize God so practically in all things as 
to overcome the deep scepticism which 
haunts even the most spiritual lives. If it 
can be shown that God is so immediately 
present in man and in matter that He can 
be appealed to directly for all good ends ; 
if His Spirit is a practical working force 



Introduction. 21 

so close at hand that each of us may 
use it with confidence in the small as 
well as the large matters of daily life, on 
the sole condition of a Tightness in such 
use, which is but another name for right- 
eousness, — if this can be proved true and 
brought home to the experience of men, 
it will do much to check the growth of 
materialism which now threatens to take 
on such alarming proportions. 

Why do we say "it" and not "he," in 
speaking of the Spirit? Simply because 
the Church, although she has long taught 
the divine personality of the Spirit, has 
not succeeded in making man trust to its 
help in the smaller details of life. Rever- 
ence has held God at arm's length from 
His world. The present need is to make 
man conscious of the universality of Spirit; 
and to achieve this we lay aside the pro- 
noun " he " for the time being, though we 
do not relinquish the idea which the per- 
sonal pronoun implies, — for in man's liv- 



22 What shall Make us Whole? 

ing and personal relation to the universal 
Deity lies his hope of being made finally 
whole. 

The following pages are an attempt to 
set forth in familiar terms the philoso- 
phy and practice of Mental Healing. It 
should be said that although the names 
" Mental Healing" and " Mind Cure" are in 
such general use that it seems necessary 
to employ them here, they are somewhat 
misleading, because they give an impres- 
sion that the cures are wrought either by 
the influence of the mind over the body, 
or by the influence of one human mind 
over another; neither of which is wholly 
true. The human mind — or better, spirit 
— can achieve nothing that is good except 
as that mind becomes the channel of the 
infinite Spirit of God. As this truth is 
more clearly recognized, we may hope that 
the names now in use will give way to 
more adequate ones, such as " Spiritual 
Healing," " Spiritual Science," etc. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF MENTAL 
HEALING. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF MENTAL 
HEALING. 



THE philosophy of Mental Healing is 
the extremest idealism. Its leading 
propositions may be thus stated. 

God, the only Reality, forever creates, 
from a necessity of His own being. The 
material universe, culminating in man and 
finding its true cause and explanation in 
him, is but an expression of God's thought. 
All created things below man move in 
blind obedience to God's will as we know 
it under the name of natural law. In man 
we find a being endowed with the power 
of choice, of dual action. He may turn 
away from material things to recognize and 



26 What shall Make us Whole ? 

believe in God, his source, or he may turn 
away from God and believe in his own 
foreshadowing, — that is, material things, 
thereby endowing them with a delusive 
appearance of reality. Reality, in the last 
analysis, is the underived power to produce 
effects, and can be predicated only of God. 
Man's mistaken choice, whether caused by 
ignorance or self-will, his tendency to look 
away from God and put confidence in ma- 
terial things, has been and is, the source 
of all his sin and sickness. The whole 
duty imposed on man by God is the duty 
of turning to and recognizing Him. This 
duty includes all others. Failure to per- 
form it produces disorder, which, if we 
accept it, becomes sin on the spiritual 
plane, and sickness on the physical. 

We become conscious of disorder only 
when it causes us pain ; hence we are apt 
to confound it with pain, which is a serious 
mistake. Pain is man's perception of his 
lack of conformity to God's idea of him. 



The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 27 

It is a sign of life, — a sign that the Divine 
idea is deeply implanted in man. We feel 
pain spiritually just in proportion as the 
ideal is revealed to us, and we become 
aware how far we are from perfectly ex- 
pressing it. This perception comes to us 
slowly on the spiritual plane, because the 
spiritual ideal is not distinct to the mass of 
mankind and thoroughly accepted by them. 
On the physical plane, however, the ideal 
is clearer. The reason it hurts a man to 
cut his finger is that his finger is meant to 
be whole. The perfect ideal of our bodies 
is so inborn in us, so much a part of our 
life, that we are not conscious of it until it 
is impaired in some way. It is a common 
saying that only the sick know how to 
appreciate health. 

Pain is a sign of life, but also a sign that 
life is not yet perfect. We are born with 
this imperfection; and because the pro- 
cess of driving it out by turning to God 
for more perfect development involves an 



28 What shall Make us Whole? 

acceptance of pain, in other words a sacri- 
fice, we, from a mistaken fear of pain, turn 
away from God and thereby store up more 
and more pain for ourselves in the greater 
wrench with which we must turn back to 
Him by and by. Thus, pain even unto 
death has become necessary for man in 
order to free him from his captivity to 
material things, and prove to him that the 
only reality is in God. Pain is the measure 
of man's divergence from his true life, but 
it is also the pledge of his return to it. 
Because God and our perfection in Him 
is the only reality, man is bound — tied 
by cords which he may strain but cannot 
break — to return and conform himself to 
God at last. Man by his struggles makes 
pain a devil to hold him captive through 
fear, when it should be an angel to lead 
him to God through faith. 

If pain is not an essential part of sin and 
sickness, what are these when considered 
in themselves ? Merely disorder, — imper- 



The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 29 

feet expression; bitter realities to us so 
long as we accept them and let our fear 
of pain hinder our turning from them to 
God, but mere mal-adjustments, soon to 
be remedied, if we face resolutely our 
ideal, and accept with joy the healing pain 
that comes w T ith the self-revelation involved 
therein. The special point made by the 
mental healers is, that this truth applies in 
physical as well as in spiritual relations, 
because all life is really one. In other 
words, if man can be led to turn his whole 
being towards God, he will be freed from 
sickness as well as from sin; because all 
material things, including every atom of 
man's body, will then fall into harmony 
and order, becoming, as they were meant 
to be, truly expressive of God's thought. 
If, on the other hand, man is not wholly 
turned towards God; if, though believing 
in the reality of the spiritual life, he still 
doubts its power over the body, — still 
doubts that spiritual life includes all other 



30 What shall Make us Whole ? 

life, — then disease, the physical disorder 
that exists in us all because we are not yet 
purely expressive of God's thought, has 
for him a reality which holds him in thrall 
until he is led to turn away from it, and by 
that turning destroy its existence for him- 
self and for others. 

A most important point is the question 
of reality as related to man. The Real is 
the royal, the ruling power. It is life, it 
is God ; all else is negation and death. In 
so far as man accepts God and becomes 
like God, disorder ceases to rule, — that is, 
to have a reality for him. Sin and sickness 
may become unreal to man if he chooses 
to make them so. Man stands between 
two possible realities, — spirit and matter. 1 
Either may become positive, or ruling, to 
him according as he believes in it, and by 
his belief becomes himself the complement 

1 We say "matter," but we really mean that spirit of 
negation and despair which is the only voice that speaks 
to us through matter when we look at it apart from 
God. 



The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 3 1 

of it. Whichever he thus makes positive 
and real to himself causes the other to 
become negative and have but an inverted 
existence for him. Man's freedom would 
seem to make it a matter of indifference 
which he should choose ; but in truth the 
whole force of creation is set to make 
him choose wisely and recognize spiritual 
things. His only chance for health and 
happiness, and for solving the problems of 
existence, lies in his lending faith to, and 
thereby making real to himself, the spiritual 
life centring in God. Thus, man's " free 
agency," in its right — and in the end only 
possible — outworking, is seen to be iden- 
tical with God's " sovereignty." In propor- 
tion as man resolutely sets his being in the 
direction of God, the natural life and all 
material things have but a negative and 
inverted existence for him; but — and this 
is the strangest part of all — the natural 
life and all material things when standing 
in this negative and inverted relation to 



32 What shall Make us Whole? 

man are found to express a harmony, 
beauty, and use that they had only hinted 
at before. They become pure expressions 
of God's thought, and therefore full of all 
that is beautiful and wholesome. Being 
no longer confounded with the thought 
they were made to express, they become 
immaterial in both senses of the word; 
that is, they become un-material, transpar- 
ent to the Divine idea, and immaterial in 
the sense of unimportant, because, having 
done their work and delivered their mes- 
sage, they can be safely changed and trans- 
muted, as we scatter the type with which 
a sentence has been printed, in order to 
use it again to print a different one. It is 
along this line of thought that the believers 
in the Mind Cure foresee for man an ulti- 
mate spiritual control over all the forces of 
Nature. We have only the smallest begin- 
ning of it as yet ; but that we have any at 
all is proof of the rest. Full control can- 
not come to man until he understands and 



The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 33 

accepts perfectly God's idea as expressed in 
every material atom, — in other words, until 
his will becomes completely identified with 
God's will; because not until then can he 
be sure of making no changes except such 
as are perfectly in accord with that law or 
being of God which is Life. 

As soon as man is capable of perceiving 
order and harmony (that is, as soon as 
he rises above the brutes), he sees traces 
of them in material things, and he also sees 
infractions of them there resulting from 
the interaction of forces not yet wholly 
harmonized. It is natural for him to be- 
lieve that the order, as well as the dis- 
order, inhere in material things as such. 
The great lesson for him to-day is that 
he is the key of the situation; that in 
him it lies to make more and more dis- 
order by so believing in material things 
that they become real, or ruling, to him, 
or to bring order, harmony, and joy to 
the whole world of Nature by making his 

3 



34 What shall Make us Whole? 

life so tributary to God that through him 
all Nature becomes obedient and finds a 
voice to speak the word enshrined in it 
from the beginning, namely, Eternal Life. 
On man lies the responsibility; to him 
is given the honor of thus turning the 
creation right side out; of giving to each 
form on earth its right explanation, and 
thereby revealing that form to itself. 

A deeper perception of the nature of 
life produces a keener sense of the respon- 
sibility and prerogative of man ; and con- 
versely, in proportion as man shoulders 
his responsibility and uses his preroga- 
tive, the nature of life is unfolded to him. 
Mental Healing has made an advance in 
both these directions. It has dared as- 
sume man's highest prerogative, — that of 
bringing life to men from God, and has 
gained a profound sense of what life 
really is. 

Life may be broadly defined as mutual 
recognition. Life absolute exists only in 



The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 35 

God, who is the source of all real life. 
Man never truly lives till he recognizes 
God. God does not wait for man's rec- 
ognition in order to live, because with 
Him this long delay which we call time 
does not exist. The end and the begin- 
ning — Alpha and Omega — are one in 
mutual recognition in Him. Our perfec- 
tion already exists in Him, and answers to 
His thought and love. The whole healing 
virtue of the Mind Cure lies in its abso- 
lute faith in this great truth, — that man's 
perfection is already complete in God. 

Life is mutual recognition. Half-life, 
or existence, results from cognition by a 
higher type. The vegetable world exists 
by virtue of cognition by the animal ; ani- 
mals depend for cognition on man, and 
are in a degree capable of re-cognizing 
him and thereby attaining a more com- 
plete life than is possible for the plant. 
This process, whereby each grade of life 
sustains the grades below itself, goes on 



36 What shall Make us Whole? 

unconsciously to us, because our belief in 
material forms is so inborn that our life 
flows out to them without our being aware 
of it. It is not until we are startled into 
questioning our relation to them, that we 
begin to withdraw our confidence in their 
apparent reality, which thereby receives 
its first death-blow. We are in no way 
to blame for the support that goes out 
from us towards material things, nor do 
we in any way suffer from it so long as 
it is unconscious. It is only when our 
confidence in them has been shaken by 
intimations of our higher life, of the true 
reality, that we become self-conscious, — 
that is, aware of our lack of adjustment 
to God the Real. Then the process of 
detachment from material things must go 
on more and more, and we involve our- 
selves in much trouble and confusion if 
we continue to allow any form or idea 
below ourselves to rule us. Our whole 
responsibility lies in recognizing God as 



The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 37 

the real, the only ruling, positive force 
of the universe. Man cannot make both 
God and material things positive to him- 
self at the same time; therefore, if he 
makes God positive to himself, he turns 
to material things as their master. Him- 
self the positive pole to them, he forces 
them into that negative attitude in which 
their only true and indestructible reality 
consists ; because then alone do they ex- 
press the divine order, life being passed 
on to them through man from God, in 
due sequence. Man thus stands as an in- 
telligent pivot upon whom, and by whose 
aid, the whole creation is to turn to the 
light. He has power to communicate life 
to all lower forms just in proportion as 
he receives life from God. If he looks at 
a temptation with fear that he shall yield 
to it, whether that temptation take the 
form of a spiritual or a physical disorder; 
if he doubts God's power in him to tri- 
umph over it, then the temptation becomes 



38 What shall Make us Whole? 

the positive or ruling pole to him, and has 
an existence in him which quickly devel- 
ops into sin on the spiritual plane or into 
sickness on the physical. If, on the other 
hand, he refuses to recognize the tempta- 
tion and turns from it to God, he draws 
from Him who is forever the Great Posi- 
tive, the great I AM, supplies of real life, 
which passing through man drive out all 
disorder by bringing both soul and body 
to their right attitude at the negative pole. 
This service one man can in a measure 
do for another. We can make ourselves 
mediums of the Divine life in each other's 
behalf. We can receive so much of it 
through our love for and belief in them, 
as we see them in God y that we become 
positive to them, and so pass along to 
them the current of life in such manner 
as to drive out their diseases and break 
into their prison cells of discouragement 
and despair. 

It is on the perception of this power that 



The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 39 

all Mental Healing is founded. Because all 
life is one, every human being can, accord- 
ing to his faith and knowledge, see for an- 
other the ideal of that other, quarrying it 
as it were out of the unseen, and bringing 
it so close to the needy one that it con- 
forms his feebleness to itself. We all do 
this unconsciously for our friends when 
we have faith in their best possibility. 
Mental Healing goes one step farther, and 
by grasping the reality of God so intensely 
that all things are as nothing in compari- 
son, it brings the Divine life so close to 
human suffering as to reach the inmost 
depths of the physical being and drive 
out disease. 

There is a dark side to all this which 
one would willingly ignore, but which de- 
mands a few words. A measure of con- 
trol over natural forces and over feeble 
human wills is sometimes attained by men 
of great nervous energy, whose belief in 
themselves is so positive as to force other 



40 What shall Make us Whole? 

elements into a negative attitude. Such 
persons would be most effective for good 
if they recognized the source of their 
power as the Infinite Spirit of love and 
wisdom, for then they could will only such 
changes in others as tend to health and 
blessedness. Failing in this recognition, 
the work of human wills is not only dis- 
orderly, but sometimes even malicious, 
and may do much temporary mischief. 
But it is not after all greatly to be feared, 
because it is self-limited. It is mere re- 
flex action stimulated by the forms and 
influences of the external world, and, like 
all idolatry, all imputing to the creature 
the functions of the Creator, all making 
real anything less than God, it is sure to 
be overthrown and brought to nought, for 
the very simple reason that the unconse- 
crated human will soon becomes so out of 
relation to the only source of real life 
that its supply is cut off and its power 
ceases. 



THE PRACTICE OF MENTAL 
HEALING. 



THE PRACTICE OF MENTAL 
HEALING. 

HERE we come to facts and to methods. 
There is one class of facts which is 
ignored by those who have written about 
Mental Healing, but which is most signifi- 
cant. It is the almost universal testimony 
of those who have been treated, that they 
have received great benefit in moral and 
spiritual directions, manifesting itself in 
greater harmony of character and improved 
intellectual soundness and balance. Nu- 
merous persons have attended lectures on 
Mental Healing whose physical condition 
did not need improving, but who were in- 
terested in the truth itself. These have 



44 What shall Make us Whole? 

found it a great inspiration and help ; and 
it is worth while to make note of their ex- 
perience as an offset to the stories, not 
infrequently told, of the failures and mal- 
practice of those who undertake to cure 
by the new methods. Failures there cer- 
tainly are, and ill-judged applications of 
the truth, doubtless ; but let us remember 
that the science is in its infancy, and has 
yet much wisdom to learn. We may hope 
that it will never have to give account for 
worse misdeeds than already disfigure the 
annals of medicine. 

We have, said that the Mind Cure and 
the Faith Cure are two different phases of 
the same school. The Mind Cure is by no 
means without the element of faith; but 
it hopes, by making no demand for faith 
at the outset, to reach many who might 
otherwise be repelled by such a demand. 
Those who seek its aid only because they 
have exhausted all other means of help, or 
those who come merely at the solicitation 



The Practice of Mental Healing.. 45 

of friends, are successfully healed, as well 
as those whose spiritual development has 
already fitted them to receive the doctrines. 
A mental attitude of resolute opposition 
or contempt is a serious barrier to any 
good work ; but if the attitude is merely 
negative, the simple fact that a person 
submits himself to an influence which uses 
no material means, argues sufficient faith 
on his part to render it possible for the 
healer to make a beginning. Later, when 
successive treatments have caused the seed 
of right life which is in every human being 
to germinate and put forth shoots, instruc- 
tion is given, either individually or in 
classes, and the patient is led, according 
to his capacity, to recognize the Divine 
Spirit that is working in him, and to trust 
it and appeal to it independently of the 
efforts of the healer. The great point 
made by the Mind, as distinguished from 
the Faith Cure, is that this awakening 
of the patient's personal faith in unseen 



46 What shall Make us Whole ? 

things is not attempted till it has been 
proved to him, by his own experience, 
that beneficent physical changes can be 
wrought in him without visible or material 
means. He is then prepared for faith ; not 
prepared to receive the old theological dog- 
mas, perhaps, but prepared to believe, and 
put his trust in, an unseen benevolent 
power. When once this growth of soul is 
started, the man's allegiance is transferred 
from the material to the spiritual pole of 
life. This is the " change of heart," or 
" new birth," which all true religion seeks 
to bring about, and which, if our spiritual 
senses were acute enough to discern it, 
would appear as real and as startling as 
if the person experiencing it were being 
turned the other side out. The change 
does show itself, even to our bodily eyes, 
in the gracious smile and outreaching ex- 
pression which replace the troubled and 
gloomy looks that went before. Artists 
have recognized the contrast from the days 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 47 

of Da Vinci l to the present time, when 
Vedder paints for us the hesitation of the 
Soul between Doubt and Faith. In this 
picture the head of Faith is a novel con- 
ception, but quite in accord with the truth 
we are trying to state. Faith has usually 
been represented with upraised eyes, as 
though spiritual realities could only be 
discerned by turning away from the life 
that now is. Vedder's Faith is of a more 
robust type. It looks serenely out instead 
of up ; daring to face all earthly pain and 
confusion because of its utter reliance on 
the Divine power which will, in the end, 
reduce all things to order. 

Now, if the change from doubt to faith, 
which is the great thing to be desired for 
us all, can be brought about by Mental 

1 In the Sciarra Palace at Rome is a picture de- 
signed by Da Vinci, but painted by Luini. It bears 
the title "Vanity and Modesty," but is in fact a pro- 
found study of two contrasted types, — the life that 
centres wholly around self, and the life that reaches out 
in care and thought for others, 



48 What shall Make us Whole? 

Healing, what are the methods whereby 
it is accomplished? In what do the so- 
called " treatments " consist? 

It may boldly be asserted that the treat- 
ments are prayer, and prayer in its most 
prevailing form. Prayer may be best de- 
fined as the effort of the human will to 
place itself in perfect accord with the 
Divine will. To achieve this we may pour 
out our burdened hearts in specific peti- 
tions and close them with the name of 
Christ (which embodies for us the su- 
preme sacrifice of the human will to the 
Divine), thus signifying that if we have 
not prayed aright we trust that God will 
be wiser than our prayers. This is prayer 
as most of us know it. An increased con- 
sciousness of God in us and in all things 
will, however, tend to simplify our prayers. 
When we realize God as perfect wisdom 
and perfect love, we shall see that He 
needs neither instruction nor appeal ; that 
on His part all is done even before we 



Vie Practice of Mental Healing. 49 

ask it. Therefore prayer chiefly concerns 
ourselves, and others like us in whom 
ignorance, doubt, and self-will hinder the 
workings of that perfect love and perfect 
wisdom to which we appeal. Here prayer 
has an immense field, in bringing us, and 
our short-sighted plans and rebellious 
wishes, into harmony with our highest and 
best selves, — that is, God's idea of us. 
This is exactly what the treatments of men- 
tal healers accomplish. The person who 
gives the treatment sets his whole soul to 
the work, and sees with absolute convic- 
tion the ideal perfection of the unconscious 
individual before him ; sees it for the pa- 
tient, — thus transferring his whole spirit- 
ual energy to the case of another, to serve 
that other's need in the true spirit of love. 
Treatments like this may be given by any 
one as soon as he has grasped the funda- 
mental truth that God's will is perfect for 
each and all. If he doubts this, and thinks 
that the special case before him is an 
4 



SO Wlnt shall Make us Whole? 

exception, and that so much error and sick- 
ness as the patient exhibits must argue a 
very limited possibility for that patient, 
the treatment will fall flat and powerless. 
It is only the sublime faith that is almost 
sight, a faith that dares take its stand in 
the very heart of God, that can avail. 

This central truth is in a way the sim- 
plest truth, because faith is always a short 
cut compared with knowledge. Treat- 
ments given in this way are often very 
effective, because if the centre is moved 
the circumference is bound to follow. This 
explains the success of many beginners. 
Knowledge, however, is needed to compact 
and define the steps up which faith hastens 
with rapid flight. Those who are distin- 
guished in Mental Healing learn by long 
practice, and by trusting their spiritual 
perceptions, to see how cause and effect 
are related one to the other, and how the 
special disease of the person under treat- 
ment is caused by some special spiritual 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 5 1 

incompleteness. They can therefore ad- 
dress their treatment to the particular qual- 
ity of soul which needs to be developed, 
and thus be more effective than a person 
who treats with less understanding. 

All this seems perhaps somewhat re- 
mote from the immediate question of 
physical health, the search for which has 
been the means of drawing so many to 
what ere long they discovered to be a 
higher spiritual life. But the question re- 
mains, " Did they find the physical health 
they sought ? " In many cases they have 
found it, speedily and to a degree al- 
most miraculous; in other cases the im- 
provement has been slower, and some 
have gone away disappointed. These 
varying results are due to the varying ca- 
pacity of individuals to be affected from 
the spiritual side, to the variety of out- 
side influences to which the patient is sub- 
jected, and to the varying nature and cause 
of the diseases treated. All persons can be 



52 What shall Make us Whole? 

affected by Mental Healing if they yield 
themselves to it. fully and for a sufficient 
length of time ; but those who have least 
faith, or openness to spiritual things, are 
the most difficult to reach, and these 
are precisely the ones whose patience gives 
out soonest, and who abandon the treat- 
ment in disgust, saying, " I told you so ! " 
Then, even those who are themselves will- 
ing to believe are often held back and 
seriously hindered by the atmosphere of 
doubt and ridicule which they meet at 
home. Possibly they are also continuing 
some other form of treatment all the time 
that they are receiving Mental Healing, 
with the notion that safety lies in having 
two strings to one's bow. This is a very 
serious hindrance, and is forbidden for the 
same reason that drugs are forbidden; 
namely, that dependence on them or any 
other material means leads the patient to 
look in the wrong direction, and so defeats 
the tremendous effort which is being made 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 53 

by the healer to lift the unconscious soul 
past the dead point and start all its ener- 
gies in the direction of life and health. 

In regard to the varying nature of dis- 
ease, it is obvious that if the Mind Cure is 
a genuine spiritual agent, it will reach most 
easily the nervous system, which is the 
most susceptible part of our organization. 
It is the glory of Mental Healing that it 
does reach and heal those nervous mala- 
dies which have increased in number so 
alarmingly of late years, and which so often 
baffle a physician's skill. Even its oppo- 
nents are forced to admit this. Functional 
disease is treated with conspicuous success. 
How, then, about organic disease? It is 
harder to see how this can be cured ; but 
according to our premises the centre will 
move the circumference: therefore if the 
currents of life can be set moving in the 
right direction,, every particle of the human 
frame is bound in time to be affected by 
that rightness. If our philosophy be true, 



54 What shall Make us Whole? 

we must remember that diseased matter 
has in itself no power of opposition ; that 
a cancer, for instance, has no power to live 
and grow in us except as by our recogni- 
tion we make it positive to ourselves, there- 
by imputing to it the reality that belongs 
only to God. 

Will broken bones set themselves at the 
bidding of mental healers? They do not 
claim this. They set no limit to the power 
of the Spirit they invoke, because they 
know that it is infinite; but they also 
know that spirit can be brought to bear 
upon matter only in proportion to man's 
belief in spirit, and that is at present very 
small. What Mental Healing can and does 
do is to bring life to men from God. All 
disorder that can be driven out of the 
human system by a full current from the 
true Source of being, will in time disappear 
under the influence of Mental Healing, and 
will disappear at a much faster rate when 
the world's atmosphere is more largely 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 5 5 

made up of belief in unseen things than it 
is at present. What we should now con- 
sider a miracle in the way of conforming 
an undeveloped physical frame to its ideal 
perfection will probably then be a common 
occurrence. Restoration, however, whether 
it be the reconstruction of lost limbs or the 
complete rescue of man's body from its 
apparent defeat by death, will require an 
outpouring of life such as can only become 
possible when the consciousness of man- 
kind shall rest so habitually in the spiritual 
realm that all physical expression — that is, 
the body or any part of it — will be a mat- 
ter of indifference, to be assumed or laid 
aside at will. When that time comes, we 
shall not fear being killed or maimed, be- 
cause it will be impossible to do it. The 
real life, which we shall then recognize in 
our every fibre, cannot be touched by any 
weapon of mortal warfare. 

But it is unwise to speak too much in 
this spirit of prophecy, lest it discourage 



56 What shall Make us Whole} 

the timid faith of many who are quite will- 
ing to believe in small things ; and that this 
is but the day of small things we are ready 
to admit. It is one of the chief dangers of 
those who practise Mental Healing, that in 
the atmosphere of that wonderful realm in 
which many of their hours are spent, they 
lose the sense of time and realize future 
things so vividly as to dream them actually 
present. For this cause they are apt to 
make specific promises of cure and set 
times for their fulfilment. Then, if from 
obstacles that they had not reckoned on, 
that fulfilment is delayed, the effect on the 
patient's mind is discouraging. 

As to the cause of disease. Broadly 
speaking, disease is caused by sin or wrong- 
ness of life; in other words, by inhar- 
monious spiritual conditions. What, then, 
explains the diseases of good persons, or 
of children, idiots, and others who are not 
responsible? The first answer to this is 
the mighty truth that no one of us liveth 



The Practice of Mental Healing. S7 

or dieth to himself. This solidarity of the 
race is forced upon our consciousness more 
and more every day. Our thoughts, our 
beliefs, our errors affect others often more 
than they affect ourselves ; we suffer for the 
sins of our ancestors, and our own sins 
work woe for our children. It is easy to 
see how this comes to pass in the direct 
line of descent; but when the Mind Cure 
makes the statement that the general be- 
lief in a disease — scarlet fever, for instance 
— is sufficient to produce that disease in a 
baby, or sufficient to bring some serious 
malady, not hereditary, to a person leading 
a faithful and upright life, the statement 
certainly calls for explanation. 

Here we must go back to our philosophy. 
God is One. All real life is One, because 
life is God. Each human being is such in 
virtue of his ability to accept or refuse that 
Life. By accepting it he finds his true in- 
dividuality, and discovers that by it he is 
linked to all the rest of mankind, and is 



58 What shall Make us Whole? 

responsible for and to them in a way that 
he never dreamed before. His life is so 
bound up with that of every other human 
creature, that when he believes in and ac- 
cepts disease for himself he does it also for 
the race, and thus the common conscious- 
ness becomes the home of every recognized 
malady. 

If, then, in acting for ourselves we act for 
all the rest of mankind, it only remains to 
explain how we create disease for our- 
selves. We do it by the human will when 
that will acts independently of the Divine 
will. Will may be defined as the force 
proceeding from belief, and has a distinct 
creative power. Man's will creates indi- 
rectly by the use of material means, as 
when he builds a house or ship ; but he has 
a more direct power of creating which in- 
heres in him because he is made in God's 
image. This is something that he has not 
yet begun to measure. The power of belief, 
and will proceeding from belief, to create 



Tl)e Practice of Mental Healing. 59 

and to destroy outside the realm of matter 
will some day be understood as man's 
highest attribute and deepest responsibil- 
ity. At present the full knowledge of it is 
withheld lest he should use his power im- 
piously. So long as man's will works with 
God's will he creates good and heavenly 
things which endure. If he builds a house 
on scientific principles, it stands, and its 
drains do not breed disease; or, on a 
higher plane, the man who wills only love 
and truth to his neighbor, rears for himself 
lasting monuments in the shape of noble 
institutions and quickened lives. But if 
he works only w T ith self-will, looking away 
from God, he creates the evil things of 
which hell is made. The falsely con- 
structed railway bridge crushes in its pit 
of death a thousand happy lives because it 
w r as not built according to law; so on the 
spiritual plane man's will, man's belief, if 
it looks away from God, actually creates 
disease. 



60 What shall Make us Whole? 

How can man will to create disease if he 
does not wish to create it? He does not 
will to create the disease, but he wills or 
has willed, perhaps many generations 
back, those evil deeds which produce dis- 
ease. The seed thus sown, fostered by- 
belief and fear, in time attains a spurious 
entity, terribly real in appearance, but 
which nevertheless depends wholly for its 
life upon the recognition and belief of 
man. 

A few words about belief may help us 
here. Belief may be defined as acceptance. 
Acceptance by a human spirit of any sug- 
gestion confirms and gives reality to that 
suggestion which forthwith develops and 
manifests itself in acts as if it had in itself 
a propagating power. We know that the 
suggestion would have had no such power 
if it had fallen on deaf ears so that it could 
not be accepted or believed in. In the 
realm of ethics this is the simplest of 
truths; why may it not also be true in 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 61 

physical conditions? A man is threatened 
with consumption, we will say; the idea of 
consumption, which had never been in his 
mind before, now confronts him at every 
turn, because physical symptoms constantly 
remind him of it. Is it too much to say 
that his acceptance of or belief in this idea 
has an actual power to confirm and develop 
the idea, and consequently the disease also? 
If our premises are true, and spirit rather 
than matter is the real causing force, there 
can be but one answer to this. For those 
who do not accept our premises, the whole 
argument falls to the ground. But it re- 
mains for such persons to explain how phy- 
sical changes can be brought about by the 
Mind Cure treatments, which are purely 
spiritual ; and that such changes are brought 
about there is abundant evidence, of which 
any one may satisfy himself. 

In addition to the belief of the sick per- 
son about his own disease, there is, as we 
have said, a general human acceptance of 



62 What shall Make us Whole? 

disease in the abstract, as a sort of roaring 
lion seeking whom he may devour, which 
is a solid support and encouragement to it. 
Then the belief of all the invalid's friends 
about his disease helps greatly to give it 
reality, especially if the disease can be 
called hereditary in his family, so that the 
acceptance of past generations rolls thun- 
dering into his heart with a voice of fate- 
ful prophecy. 

The disease once accepted, fear comes 
in as a most powerful agent in develop- 
ing it. 

What is fear? Nothing but the absence 
of that absolute and enfolding peace which 
is ours when we live wholly with the Divine 
life and in conformity to its laws. Fear 
may be, like most things, an angel or a 
devil to us according as we use it from the 
spiritual or the material pole of life. It 
may be a warning note ; it may also be the 
hot-bed of all evil growths. Just as pure 
desire, the soul's passion for God and 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 63 

righteousness, and for all things that min- 
ister to that righteousness, has for its guar- 
antee and seal that peace of which we have 
just spoken, so evil desire, the lust for 
things against the conscience, has for its 
concomitant and undivorcible shadow fear, 
which ever fosters lust and drives it for- 
ward in its hideous course, closing up the 
way behind and barring the pathway of 
return. Thus fear has an actual fostering 
power, and develops all evil growths just as 
surely as peace, once tasted as the result 
of pure living, produces a deathless thirst 
for higher spiritual attainments, ever ap- 
proved by deeper peace. 

Now, if this be true of fear in ethical 
relations, may we not extend the statement 
to the physical realm, as we did the state- 
ment about belief? A disease once started 
is to the body what a sin is to the soul. 
It is an inharmony, a wrong action, break- 
ing up the peace which we feel when all 
is well, and producing in its stead fear, 



64 What shall Make its Whole? 

which, if indulged, has an undreamed-of 
power to increase and develop the very- 
thing it seems to dread. Thus, wrong 
belief and fear are powerful enough in 
the under world to give disease all the 
entity it has, — the spurious entity of a 
devil, — so that it actually has a sinister 
power to fasten itself on an unconscious 
person and grow in him to great stature, 
unless checked by an influx of the true 
life. Let us understand fear, and use it 
aright. If we learn to think of it only as 
we ought to think, — namely, as a note of 
warning, — then it is transformed into one 
of God's angels, who are charged to keep 
us in all our ways. When we fear that a 
disease has attacked us, instead of fearing 
the disease itself, which is but to recognize 
it and develop it with tenfold power, let 
us so far as possible turn our thoughts 
away from the physical manifestation called 
disease, while we set our whole energy to 
round out the incompleteness, to root out 



TJie Practice of Mental Healing. 65 

the wrong feeling, thought, or habit, of 
which the disease is but the outward sign. 
Then fear becomes an angel of help, and 
with God on our side we conquer and are 
healed. And we conquer not only for 
ourselves, but for our children, for our 
race ; because every one who casts out and 
conquers fear, so that it has no existence 
for him except as a warning of moral or 
spiritual danger, is henceforth freed from 
disease, and his free and healthful life ex- 
erts a powerful influence in destroying dis- 
ease in his family and in those about him. 

It may be objected, in this connection, 
that there are many recorded instances in 
which a bedridden invalid has recovered 
the use of his limbs through fear of some 
immediate catastrophe, — the house catch- 
ing fire, for example, — and that therefore 
fear is curative. We must here discriminate 
between fear and fright. We have said 
that fear is curative when rightly used. 
If fear drives a man out of himself towards 
5 



66 What shall Make us Whole? 

God, — that is, if it leads him to forsake 
the wrong moral and physical conditions 
which have induced it, — then it becomes 
curative in the highest sense. The danger 
is, however, that fear, instead of producing 
this wholesome reaction, will only benumb 
its victim, and draw him more and more 
under the spell of some threatened evil. 
The superiority of fright over fear as a 
curative agent lies in its suddenness, which 
drives the man out of himself before he 
has time to fall under the paralyzing spell 
of danger ; and whatever drives a man out 
of himself, really drives him in the direc- 
tion of God, though it may be long ere he 
discovers this and manifests it by a more 
faithful life. A good scare is often all that 
is needed to bring about an absolute let- 
ting go of the human will ; and this letting 
go may start a man's life out of its physi- 
cal prison and restore to him the use of 
his limbs. When he recovers from his 
fright and finds that he has once used his 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 67 

limbs successfully, he is freed thenceforth 
from the paralyzing fear of not being able 
to move them, which had been his trouble 
all along. 

Until we can see the spiritual being of 
man as plainly as we now see his material 
form, we cannot tell precisely how a given 
disease was produced in a given case ; but 
of one thing we may be sure, — it has all 
come about according to inevitable law. 

Material processes of various degrees of 
complication are required to effect various 
material results. It is the same with spir- 
itual processes, which must be more elabo- 
rate and protracted to heal some maladies 
than others; and this accounts for the 
differing lengths of time and degrees of 
success in the treatments of Mental Heal- 
ing. Not until its practitioners can see and 
measure all the influences involved, can- 
they work with absolute certainty and 
precision ; but that will come in time, and 
meanwhile they have the key of the situa- 



68 What shall Make its Whole ? 

tion, and can open many a hitherto locked 
door. Some cases yield very quickly. 
Sometimes in a well-balanced and healthy 
physique the whole trouble, rheumatism, 
dyspepsia, or whatever it may be, arises 
from a suppressed grief, an unforgiving 
spirit, a fault-finding temper, or some such 
immediate cause. If these are removed, 
the sickness disappears at once. In other 
cases, where the cause is more remote, the 
cure comes more slowly; but in all cases 
the method of cure is the same. The 
healer sets his whole being at work to 
form a mental image of the patient as that 
patient ought to be } — free from sin, free 
from disease, in a state of complete devel- 
opment and harmony. He holds this im- 
age with great tenacity for a certain length 
of time, usually about fifteen minutes, and 
then the treatment is at an end. It may 
seem incredible, but this mental image 
has a vital power to conform the suffering, 
imperfect body of the patient to itself; and 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 69 

why? Only because it is really God's 
thought of the man, perceived by the 
faith of the healer, who thus performs 
an office of atonement, by bringing God's 
perfect thought and man's imperfect ex- 
pression of it — namely, his sickly body — 
together. It is a well-attested fact that 
right vital action, both physical and spir- 
itual, does develop in consequence of these 
Mind Cure treatments. 

Miss Frances Power Cobbe, in a recent 
article in the " Contemporary Review," 
entitled, " Faith healing and Fear killing," 
says that the first question to be answered, 
in any inquiry into the subject, is, whether 
the healing virtue affects directly the body 
of the patient, or whether it only affects 
the patient's mind, which in its turn affects 
the patient's body. The true answer to 
this question is, that it affects both, for the 
two are, according to the Mind Cure, really 
one. The body is only the expression in 
material terms of the informing mind, or 



70 What shall Make us Whole? 

spirit. The effect of Mental Healing is first 
felt by the patient on the spiritual or on 
the physical side of his being, according 
as his consciousness habitually rests in 
one or the other. Some persons are first 
aware of an increased spiritual vitality, and 
the physical symptoms are the last to 
yield. With others the physical derange- 
ment may be set right first, causing the 
vital currents to flow outward with such 
a fresh sense of freedom that they raise 
the soul to new life and hope. 1 

1 There is one point respecting Mental Healing which 
is theologically of much interest. While it aims at 
spiritual regeneration (and at physical regeneration only 
through the spiritual), it works towards this end with- 
out exciting the opposition of the patient. Religion, 
with the same end in view, by presenting God as exter- 
nal to the individual, rouses man's sense of all in 
which he differs from the Divine idea. This sense, 
known in religious parlance as " conviction of sin," pro- 
duces a state of conflict or rebellion against God until 
man, by surrendering his will to the Divine will, 
finds peace. Mental Healing, on the other hand, assum- 
ing that God is in every individual, addresses itself 
silently to the Divine idea in each of its patients, and 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 71 

" Absent Treatments " are a distinguish- 
ing feature of Mental Healing. Acting on 
the conviction that all real life is one in 
God, and therefore independent of the con- 
ditions of space, the healers frequently 
treat persons who are separated from them 
by thousands of miles. Results justify 
their faith. Convincing testimony may be 
had of the power of such treatments, which 
are given sometimes with, and sometimes 
without, the knowledge of the patient. 

by developing that idea from within it fills them with 
an impulse towards the best, and opens their eyes to 
their highest possibility, without rousing opposition by 
presenting that idea as external to themselves. The 
whole difference between the Mind Cure position and 
the old-fashioned theological position may be summed 
up by saying that the former assumes God to be in 
every man the rightful sovereign, and selfhood an 
imprisoning wall built of human error which debars the 
sovereign from his proper sway ; while the latter assumes 
selfhood to be all there is of man, from centre to cir- 
cumference, and by such assumption endows the un- 
regenerate man with a reality, a power of opposition, 
which in fact does not exist; though the power seems 
real enough, and will continue to seem so, until, by with- 
drawing our belief from it, we destroy its reality. 



*] 2 What shall Make us Whole? 

We have said that life is mutual recog- 
nition ; or, expressing the same thought in 
a less ideal form, life is the interaction of 
two opposing currents. This may help us 
to understand the subtle distinction be- 
tween the Mind Cure and the Faith Cure. 
Two elements must enter into the regen- 
eration of a human being in order to fill 
him with a higher life. One is the ideal 
of that being, God's perfect thought of 
him, towards which, through many vicis- 
situdes, he is tending; the other is the 
recognition and acceptance of that ideal 
by the human being himself. One is the 
Divine, — the positive current reaching 
down to the human; the other is the nega- 
tive, recipient, human current reaching up 
to the Divine. The Mind Cure addresses 
its work first to the former element, the 
Faith Cure to the latter ; and as each cur- 
rent involves the other, neither method 
is quite independent of the other. 

The Mind Cure uses all its power to lay 



The Practice of Mental Healing. 73 

hold of and bring to bear in unseen ways 
the Divine ideal of the patient, trusting to 
the spiritual force of that ideal to conform 
the patient, soul and body, to itself. Later 
it imparts wisdom by instruction, and as- 
sures its patients that their cure will not 
be lasting except as they voluntarily open 
their souls to make the Divine will and 
goodness their own. If a man could trans- 
gress all the laws of health, and then es- 
cape the consequences merely by taking 
fifteen minutes' treatment, he would not 
grow to be a better man ; and we may ac- 
cept it as the certainty of certainties that 
the perfecting of every human soul is the 
real and final cause of the whole mechan- 
ism called matter. 

The Faith Cure, on the other hand, uses 
all its power to start the human, recipient 
life-current out of its mortal prison, so 
that meeting the ever-present Divine cur- 
rent it enables that Divine current to enter 
the sufferer and fill him with new life. 



74 What shall Make us Whole? 

To achieve this, it is not at first neces- 
sary that the patient should form an intel- 
ligent conception of the ideal ; and in fact 
the Faith Cure helps chiefly those whose 
hearts are more easily moved than their 
heads. But it succeeds because things are 
so linked together in the good providence 
of God that anything which raises a man 
out of himself brings him a little nearer 
to his ideal perfection. Veneration for an 
inanimate relic or for some professed mir- 
acle-worker may achieve this, but there is 
always an attendant risk. If the patient 
grows in intelligence, he soon sees beyond 
the object or person by whom his faith 
was first aroused, and before he can trans- 
fer his allegiance and veneration to some 
higher and more worthy object there is 
danger of his letting go and losing his 
faith altogether. Safety lies in offering at 
once to soul and body no less a reality 
than God Himself. 



MENTAL HEALING AS RELATED 
TO OTHER TRUTH. 



MENTAL HEALING AS RELATED 
TO OTHER TRUTH. 



THREE statements made by the teach- 
ers of Mental Healing lay its doctrines 
open to the charge of absurdity. These 
are — I . That disease is not a reality ; 
2. That all material remedies are useless 
if not mischievous; 3. That sickness and 
death are not the will of God. 

Before attempting to answer these 
charges separately, we may say in general 
that the extreme position taken by the 
doctrine of Mental Healing is no more ex- 
treme than that taken by Religion, Science, 
or any other great working hypothesis. 
When we look at things simply as philoso- 



78 What shall Make us Whole ? 

phers, we see more truths than are at 
once available for practical use. A man 
may have his hands too full of weapons 
to go to war. When we are in the line of 
achievement we must select some weapons 
and discard others. Science, seeking facts 
and working by analysis, feels that she 
must stop her ears to the voice of the 
Spirit, lest in the self-forgetfulness of lis- 
tening she should overlook a single fact 
or blunder in a single process. On the 
other hand, Religion often slights or ig- 
nores obvious facts, and in her determina- 
tion to compass worthy ends is in danger 
of leaving some most essential element out 
of her problem. Science and Religion are 
like two children set in a room to pick up 
and re-string a thousand scattered pearls 
which form a girdle. Science, kneeling 
to the pearls, seeks them in every corner 
with tireless persistence, and almost for- 
gets the golden thread which alone can 
hold them together after they are found, 



Mental Healing as to other Truth. 79 

so that chaos and dispersion cannot come 
again. Her sister stands aloof grasping 
the two ends of the golden thread, and is 
in such haste to knot these together in a 
perfect girdle again, that she makes light 
of the importance of each separate individ- 
ual pearl, and is restless and vexed when 
Science tells her that the girdle cannot be 
perfect so long as one pin-point of a pearl 
is left out. 

Now, it is evident that each of these 
handmaidens of the Lord is shutting her 
eyes to one class of facts, and that neither 
will revolutionize the world without the 
other's help. The philosophy of which 
Mental Healing is the practical expression, 
seems at first, when crudely stated, to be 
at issue with both, but may end by recon- 
ciling the two. When it says that disease 
is unreal, man's body a shadow, and all 
material remedies useless, Science, espe- 
cially medical science which is occupied 
with the needs of the body, feels that if 



80 What shall Make us Whole ? 

this be true her whole occupation and 
charter are taken away. When we are 
told that sickness and death are not God's 
will, Religion, which has won her high- 
est triumphs by reconciling men to such 
afflictions on the ground that they are 
God's will, feels the very foundations trem- 
bling beneath her feet. 

Thus the new philosophy makes extreme 
statements in two opposite directions ; but 
does it not stretch forth a hand of sym- 
pathy in two opposite directions also ? 
Does not the assertion of the unreality 
of all material things lie at the very heart 
of a religion whose Founder said, " Who- 
soever he be of you that forsaketh not all 
that he hath, he cannot be my disciple "? 
On the other hand, shall not Science, 
whose watchword is evolution by the in- 
evitable sequence of natural law, welcome 
as an ally the voice which says that sick- 
ness and death are not the will of God? 
This means, in scientific parlance, that evo- 



Mental Healing as to other Truth. 81 

lution must go on until there is no more 
work for it to do ; that the seal of Divine 
approval cannot be finally set — in other 
words, the process of evolution cannot 
cease — until a creature is produced so per- 
fectly fitted to all surrounding conditions 
that he stands triumphant over sickness 
and death. This will undoubtedly be 
brought about by the " survival of the fit- 
test ;" but we begin to see that because 
man's spiritual environment is more con- 
trolling than his physical one, earth's great 
Survivor must be he who is fittest physi- 
cally because he is fittest spiritually. He 
alone can never be overthrown. He is the 
Christ. 

We will now take up the three objections 
in detail, beginning with the statement 
that disease is not a reality. The abstract 
ground for saying this was explained in 
an earlier chapter. It remains to consider 
the practical outworking of the position. 
A careful statement of the truth would 
6 



82 What shall Make us Whole? 

be that disease has no reality, or power 
to rule, and maintains itself in man in op- 
position to the will or life of God, ex- 
cept as man by his belief in and fear of 
disease endows it with such power. The 
great desideratum is to turn the patient 
towards belief in life and away from belief 
in death. By such turning he withdraws 
the support of his vitality from the dis- 
ease, which thenceforth is unreal and cannot 
rule him. Until he does this, the disease is 
real to him ; but no statement is too strong 
which can, by breaking up his belief in its 
reality, encourage him to face towards the 
Source of all true life, and thereby prove 
or make true that which before was only 
a matter of faith; namely, the unreality 
of the disease. It is to be observed that 
this is no passive ignoring of the malady, 
but an active and vigorous turning away 
from it in full faith that the very act of 
turning strikes a blow at its vitals. 

To ignore a disease is not to cure it. 



Mental Healing as to other Truth. 83 

A superficial understanding of the state- 
ment that disease is not a reality, might 
lead a person to think that in case a serious 
malady threatens us, all we have to do is to 
ignore it resolutely and go on living just as 
we did before, in unwholesome conditions 
perhaps, or under some strain of over- 
work. Such a course would be folly. Its 
effect would be to encourage the disease 
by opposition; for while the patient flat- 
tered himself that he was ignoring his 
complaint, he would really be opposing 
his strength to it day by day in a losing 
battle, and thereby developing the disease 
and making it real. If with a better under- 
standing he says bravely to himself, " This 
disease has no reality which can for an 
instant compare with the reality of God, 
therefore I will turn my life wholly to Him, 
make myself pliant in each detail and cir- 
cumstance to His will, and seek from Him 
in all right ways those currents of life 
which shall drive out everything in me to 



84 What shall Make us Whole ? 

which disease can cling, " then, though the 
process may be long, the cure is already- 
begun. 

Secondly, the teachers of Mental Heal- 
ing say that material remedies are useless 
if not mischievous, and demand that those 
who seek their treatment shall abandon the 
use of medicine. This sounds like an un- 
reasonable position until we realize how 
great a risk a sick person runs of having 
his life completely introverted by the aver- 
age medical treatment. The doctor says 
to one threatened with disease, " You must 
give up your plan of life and devote your- 
self to your health. You must seek ex- 
actly the right climate, travelling from 
place to place in pursuit of it if necessary. 
You must take this mixture to relieve 
one symptom, and that mixture to relieve 
another," and so on, till the man's whole 
attention is turned away from his study, 
business, or whatever was drawing him 
in a healthy manner out of himself, and is 



Mental Healing as to other Truth. 85 

turned in upon his own body and his own 
sensations. The effect of this cannot but 
be bad, and the more remedies are multi- 
plied the worse it becomes. Unquestiona- 
bly change of climate is often beneficial, and 
remedies have their use, but the one thing 
absolutely indispensable is to keep the 
patient's life flowing outward in a strong 
current, — for on such right direction of his 
vital forces the whole question of recovery 
hangs. This is the sine qua non, it is life 
itself; and every material remedy, every 
change in outward circumstance, should 
wait humbly at the gate until its assistance 
is summoned by this Divine force. Many 
of our best physicians realize this truth, 
and are working to-day in the spirit of the 
Mind Cure without being aware of it. 

No doubt drugs produce powerful and, 
where rightly applied, beneficent effects; 
but these touch the circumference rather 
than the centre of life in man. The new 
practice, in its effort to move men from the 



86 What shall Make us Whole? 

centre, forbids the use of all material means 
of cure, and takes thereby a position, which 
if logically extended, would forbid also the 
use of food. An extreme statement seems 
to be the necessary weapon of the reformer. 
When Mental Healing shall have estab- 
lished its point that man must be moved 
first and chiefly from the spiritual side 
even in physical matters, we shall find 
that the Divine Spirit, instead of dispens- 
ing with material means, is our one un- 
erring guide to the wise use of such 
means; teaching man to master them in- 
stead of letting them master him, which 
;s the danger to-day. 

Multiplication of remedies, like speciali- 
zation of practice, is part of the mod- 
ern tendency, which is in all directions 
to analyze, to discriminate, to subdivide. 
Persons occupied in this way think they 
are adding greatly to the sum of hu- 
man knowledge, and that by each hair- 
splitting they are securing a new unit. 



Mental Healing as to other Truth. 87 

This is a mistake. Subdivision never makes 
more, but less. It makes more things, 
perhaps, but less life, — and life is what 
men need. Specialization and analysis are 
good ; but if we carry them too far we get 
the parts so out of relation to the whole that 
they are cut off and have no life in them- 
selves. The more we can conscientiously 
group things together, overlooking minor 
differences, the better we see them in 
that relation to the whole which alone 
gives life to the parts; for be it said, in 
every language and in every place where 
a voice can be heard, no part, 710 thing has 
any life in and of itself. Life is God, the 
centre, dominating the whole ; to look for 
it elsewhere is the most fatal of mistakes, 
and the degrees of this mistake sum up all 
the sin and suffering on earth. 

Thirdly, sickness and death are not 
God's will for man. This strikes harshly 
on the ear of one who is just able to bear 
a crippling infirmity or a great bereave- 



88 What shall Make us Whole ? 

ment by accepting it as the will of God. 
Truly, it is the will of God on a certain 
plane; but because the condition of life 
is growth, we must never rest satisfied on 
any one plane of existence. God's will is 
always the highest thing we can conceive 
of, and as by our faith in it we bring that 
highest thing to pass, our vision opens 
to new spheres of life ; thus God's will, 
the Ideal, moves on, drawing us ever to 
higher ends. The fatal mistake made by 
man's faithlessness is that of arresting God's 
will at any point and declaring such and 
such a thing to be final. Perfection alone 
can be final, because perfection is God. 
Christians will agree that sickness and 
death are not God's final will; but they 
are slow to realize how immediate is the 
duty imposed on man of bringing this final 
will to pass here and now. The material 
depths which faith can reach and regener- 
ate are exactly in proportion to the heights 
it climbs ; and a new plane of development, 



Mental Healing as to other Truth. 89 

a new possibility for man, is opening to 
us to-day, the outcome of which will be 
a human body so perfect in every atom 
and fibre as to be a worthy "temple of 
the Holy Ghost." But this cannot come 
so long as we sit down under suffering, 
accepting it as God's will. Not that we 
are to maintain towards it an attitude of 
rebellion; but rather that we are to see 
beyond it to the perfect life that God's 
will holds for us all, and in the strength 
of that vision to pass fearlessly through 
pain to joy. 

The question of planes and stages of 
development is a very important one, be- 
cause most of our bad reasoning comes 
from mixing up these planes. What seems 
an obvious truth on one plane may change 
its guise completely when we reach the 
next, and yet be fundamentally the same 
truth on both. A careful study of these 
planes will help us to understand both why 
persons of low moral development often 



90 What shall Make us Whole? 

have good health, and also why persons of 
lovely and spiritual character are frequently 
invalids, — questions which puzzle us if we 
accept literally the truth that body and 
spirit are one, and are ruled by the same 
laws. 

A man who lives wholly on the material 
or lowest plane may have good health for 
a time, because he is as undisturbed in the 
currents of his being as the animals are. 
He does not yet feel the discrepancy be- 
tween his actual life and his ideal possibil- 
ity. But this cannot last; he is made in 
the image of God, and to that image he is 
linked by desire. In his ignorance he fan- 
cies that desire can be satisfied by appro- 
priating its object; so he steals from others 
money, life, or virtue, and his thirst is still 
unquenched. Such a course is sure to 
breed physical as well as social derange- 
ment, till the man's career is checked. His 
body is detained in prison perhaps for 
some infraction of law, and much more 



Mental Healing as to other Truth. 91 

surely his life is imprisoned in his body, 
because instead of flowing healthily out- 
ward in love to God and man, it has all 
along been drawing inward towards him- 
self. Because life is essentially the inter- 
action of two currents, this drawing in 
cannot go on beyond a certain point ; and 
unless the man learns that the secret of 
desire is to give rather than to receive, — in 
other words, that he can receive only by 
giving, — he goes on wrapping himself up 
tighter and tighter, until his imprisoned life 
works serious physical disturbance and his 
health is wrecked. By his mistaken idea 
of the meaning of desire he has made pain 
necessary for himself. 

When suffering has taught him to aban- 
don his evil practices, he enters on the next 
plane of existence with impaired physical 
vigor, but with a new understanding of the 
meaning of life. This may be only nega- 
tive ; it may debar him from the old paths 
without giving him any appetite for the 



92 What shall Make us Whole? 

new; he may merely say to himself that 
wrong-doing does not pay, but even this is 
a gain. 

The lesson that life must flow outward 
is now repeated in a different form. The 
man is no longer in danger of having his 
life introverted by gross sin, but by his 
struggle against the physical limitations 
which his own errors have imposed on 
him. He beats the prison bars for years 
perhaps, until he learns to accept suffering 
as God's will. Then peace comes, and he 
grows upwards, bearing his pain cheerfully, 
and looking forward to the day when death 
shall give him freedom. This is the plane 
on which most Christian lives are lived. 

On the first or physical plane God's will 
for the man appeared to him under the 
guise of pain, that he might cease from sin 
and enter the moral plane. On the second 
or moral plane it appears still under the 
guise of pain, that he may detach himself 
from his body more and more, and rise 



Mental Healing as to other Truth. 93 

to the spiritual plane. Now another plane 
opens on which man may rise so high 
above his body as to identify himself with 
tlie will or life of God. When he does 
this perfectly, all physical disturbance will 
be rectified by the power of that life in 
him, and his body will be regenerated as 
well as his soul. If persons of spiritual 
character have not hitherto had good 
health, it is simply because their faith has 
not reached high enough to bring down to 
them such fulness of life as shall inundate, 
cleanse, and break through all the physical 
as well as moral stagnant places in their 
being. 

The way out of our troubles may be 
through pain; but if we cease from making 
more pain for ourselves by our struggles, 
and accept what remains as simply curative, 
we pass through it swiftly and cheerfully, 
and by each victory we diminish the need 
of it for ourselves and for others. The 
body need not in the end be sacrificed to 



94 What shall Make us Whole} 

the spirit. So long as it imprisons the 
spirit it must be crushed, blasted even, by 
the fearful dynamics of affliction and dis- 
ease; but when it is once in its proper 
place, at the feet of the spirit, obedient in 
every atom and fibre to the highest law, 
then we shall see the dawning of a heavenly 
day when healthy bodies and healthy 
spirits shall be inseparable, and when our 
young people, wisely instructed and care- 
fully nurtured, shall blossom from one 
stage of life's beauty to the next without 
a struggle. 

Is death to be conquered? In the end, 
yes. Living in that faith, we see the veil 
between the two worlds grow thinner and 
more transparent. As we abide in and 
recognize only those things which belong 
to the life of God, our spiritual senses un- 
fold, and we find ourselves in a vast realm 
which is the eternal home of all that con- 
forms to its laws, regardless of time, space, 
or material circumstance. Not one true, 



Mental Healing as to other Truth. 95 

pure, or loving thought has ever been lost 
since the world began, or ever can be lost, 
because these are of God, the only Reality. 
Just so far as our beloved who have passed 
from sight have embodied these thoughts 
they are indestructible, and await our rec- 
ognition in that kingdom of heaven which 
is so near to each one of us that we may 
enter it at any moment if we will, and live 
evermore to the music of its harmonies. 



CONCLUSION. 



CONCLUSION. 



WE begin to see that the human will, 
or spirit, is the great channel 
through which the Divine Spirit is to 
regenerate and harmonize the world of 
Nature. That this may come to pass, 
man's will must become both consecrated 
and enlightened. Religion calls us to the 
first duty, Science to the second. They 
are equally necessary, and neither can dis- 
pense with the other's help even in its own 
domain. A religious man may devote his 
life to helping his fellows, but he cannot do 
this with success, in fact he cannot remain 
long enough in this world to do it at all, ex- 
cept as he understands external conditions. 



ioo What shall Make us Whole} 

On the other hand, spiritual truth, which 
alone can reconcile all the facts of life, be- 
comes the property of man only as a result 
of the surrender or consecration of the 
human will. 

We have said that life is the interaction of 
two currents, — the human will reaching up 
to the Divine, and the Divine will reaching 
down to the human ; and that because the 
Divine will is the master force, the human 
will must make itself the passive or recep- 
tive pole in this interchange if life is to 
stand on its right basis. It is the same 
with the appropriation of truth. Man's 
energy can accumulate facts to an indefi- 
nite extent; but if he would perceive the 
relation between these facts, which is truth 
in its high sense, he must make himself 
ardently passive (if we may use such a 
phrase) to the impress of that truth, hush- 
ing his own personality lest some prejudice 
should bias his conclusions. This prin- 
ciple is well recognized by Science in her 



Conclusion. 101 

own domain. It is the scientific con- 
science, the faith that in one who is willing 
to see the truth there is something so at- 
tuned to, so made after the pattern of the 
truth itself, that one will recognize and 
receive the other. We may call this fac- 
ulty by no higher names than candor and 
sound judgment; but it is in reality noth- 
ing less than God in us recognizing and ac- 
cepting the Infinite God, who will stand 
revealed as such when both religious and 
scientific thinkers extend the area of their 
acceptance to take in all facts, physical and 
spiritual, as belonging to one universal 
life. 

It requires much faith thus to see life 
whole, to bring both classes of facts into 
our field of vision at once, and see them 
ruled by the same laws and bound together 
by the same principles, because the balance 
of human belief is still so heavy on the 
material side. Even the most spiritual 
lives accord to unseen realities a confidence 



102 What shall Make us Whole? 

which differs widely from the easy uncon- 
scious reliance with which they handle 
dress, food, and other practical problems. 
This is not strange : we are just emerging 
from matter; we have been surrounded 
by material forms from our earliest years. 
No wonder our life flows out to them. It 
is not cause for blame, it is simply the fact. 
But now, if instead of drawing a hard and 
fast line between material and spiritual 
things, so called, we can have faith enough 
to try the experiment of accepting them 
both together, the scientific conscience 
will itself oblige us to transfer the centre 
of our lives from self to God. 

By the very act of opening ourselves to 
spiritual truth we break down the narrow 
limits of selfhood and become conscious of 
the universal Life. The inflow of this life 
fills us with a sense of harmony; and why? 
Because being the universal life it holds all 
things in right relation one to another, and 
by virtue of that right relation, when ac- 



Conclusion. 103 

cepted by us, tends to make whole or bring 
into order the individual and ultimately 
the race. We all recognize order as the 
arrangement of details in obedience to a 
central plan, so that one idea, one life, per- 
vades the whole ; conversely, it is only by 
being brought into such order that a mass 
of details becomes a whole, moved by 
one impulse. In proportion as man be- 
comes individually whole (that is, orderly 
in his physical structure and working) and 
part of a greater whole (that is, in his 
right place and relation to all other be- 
ings which compose that whole), in that 
proportion he becomes conscious of the 
universal life whose laws produce this 
wholeness and order, and in its organic 
centre he recognizes God. 

When this practical — not merely intel- 
lectual — recognition of God becomes the 
common experience, material things will 
grow transparent to the Spirit in ways that 
we cannot dream of now, but we may be 



104 What shall Make us Whole? 

sure that they will " make all things new." 
We need dread no catastrophes in those 
days ; they will be of the past. The vio- 
lent wrenching from man of his material 
possessions is only needed, only caused in 
fact, by his clinging to them overmuch. 
As a picture that we have outgrown is 
first seldom looked at, then relegated to an 
attic and at last to a dust-heap, so we shall 
grow indifferent to, lay aside, and uncon- 
sciously leave behind our mortality and all 
that belongs to it as we step forward to 
better things. Thus death will be dissolved 
in life. 

The leaders in Mental Healing, like the 
prophets of old, have seen this day from 
afar, and are trying to bring its laws and 
conditions into immediate effect for the 
help of man. The results they have to 
show are impressive, less by reason of their 
extent — though this is considerable — than 
by reason of their extraordinary harmoniz- 
ing of man's physical with his spiritual 



Conclusion. 105 

nature. This is what we should expect 
if the true divine order has been found, 
and the central force touched which moves 
all things together, both spiritual and 
physical. 

Harm has been done in some cases 
because extremists in the new practice 
have not added patience and knowledge 
to their faith. In their eagerness to bring 
their idealism to bear they have ignored 
the actual, and have been unmindful of 
the supreme delicacy and difficulty of the 
task of adjusting details in that border- 
land where the ideal and the actual meet. 
Some unwise ones have insisted, for ex- 
ample, that an aged woman, dying of a 
terrible disease, should abandon all the 
palliatives that were making her last hours 
endurable, and trust herself wholly to 
faith in the hope of a cure. Speedy and 
suffering death ensued. The patient was 
too far gone; she had too slight a hold 
on the physical to make it possible for 



106 What shall Make us Whole! 

her life to flow much longer through 
its channels. The healers should have 
recognized this, and realized that a course 
which might safely and wisely be pre- 
scribed for a person of average, though 
disordered, vitality, may be ruinous if 
applied to a case like the one we have 
mentioned. The breath that fans a vig- 
orous flame into greater activity may 
suffice to extinguish a feeble one. Un- 
doubtedly the woman might have been 
cured by a miracle; but to achieve this, 
the miracle-worker must have had wisdom 
in proportion to his faith. Christ, the 
great miracle-worker, was himself the 
Truth, the Wisdom. We are only begin- 
ning to assimilate it. 

Such abuse of the principles of Mental 
Healing is sure to bring its own punish- 
ment. In time, these blots on the record 
of the new practice will disappear, and 
men will own that it is doing a real ser- 
vice and is making a bold advance into 



Conclusion. 107 

the very heart of Christianity, forcing it 
to yield its deepest secrets for the heal- 
ing of the nations. Homoeopathy has made 
a step in the same direction; it counsels 
the introduction of poisons in infinitesimal 
doses into the human system in the faith 
that the disorder they cause will rouse 
the inherent order or wholeness of the 
physical organism to assert its integrity by 
driving out the intruder and everything 
that resembles him. This is a spiritual 
advance of no small magnitude, because 
it acknowledges and relies on the reactive 
power of a Divine life-principle in man. 
But so long as homoeopathy uses any 
material means at all, it hesitates on the 
brink of that absolute faith in the Divine 
life-principle which sees in it a first cause, 
active instead of reactive; and thus by 
supreme trust in it brings the vital power 
immediately to bear. Mental Healing has 
dared to do this, and should enjoy the 
credit due to its courage. 



108 What shall Make us Whole? 

Blending the spiritual and physical in 
one life does not do away with duty, but 
transfigures duty by an ever-present sense 
of heavenly aid. When we practically 
treat the physical as included in the 
spiritual life, several things follow in our 
experience. 

1. If God is in and of us, if His con- 
ception is the secret of our individuality, 
then that individuality may be trusted 
and revered. We may train and develop 
instead of suppressing it, and thereby 
" hitch our wagon to a star." 

2. There is a star for each one of us, — 
an ideal perfection to be made actual 
by our acceptance. Armed with this cer- 
tainty we can bring the ideal treatment 
to bear both on moral and physical per- 
versity, — seeing through the evil mani- 
festation, whether it be wilfulness or bodily 
pain, to the perfect wholeness that God's 
will holds for the erring one here and 
now. God's will is timeless. His perfec- 



Conclusion. 109 

tion, and man's perfection in Him, is an 
eternal present. Time is only the delay of 
our wills in accepting, and space only the 
separation of our wills in existing apart 
from, that omnipresence, or all-presentness, 
of God. 

3. When the two lives become one 
in our experience, we find that in oblit- 
erating the line between them we have 
struck a mighty blow at the fear of death ; 
and that death has been a limit, a place 
of parting to us, only because we have, 
by maintaining this line, insisted upon 
making it so. In one sense death — the 
Cross — will always remain, because it is in 
its essence the passing from a lower truth 
to a higher one. 1 In this we shall ever 
rejoice, as those who have learned the 
true meaning of the Cross now rejoice to 
accept it and pass through it continually to 
larger life. But as the two worlds become 

1 Death is the supreme physical expression of this 
truth of the Cross. 



no What shall Make us Whole? 

more and more one to us, our common 
assurance of the supreme reality of that 
which is now unseen will remove all un- 
certainty, all terror, from the step that 
carries us from one world to the other. 
We shall then see in death and the Cross 
only a wide-open, sunny portal through 
which all may throng joyously to seek 
supplies of life. 

Christ is the personal embodiment of 
this future for man. He is the turning 
from ourselves to God. No man ever 
stepped forth out of himself to a higher 
thought, but by that step he embodied 
himself in the Christ. There is no other 
way. Christ is part of the constitution 
and course of Nature, the eternal move- 
ment from the human to the Divine. 
Between our isolated, stunted selves and 
the great ocean of God's life stands the 
Cross. If we turn away, it looms terrible 
with fear; if we press it joyfully to our 
hearts, we pass through it to peace and 



Conclusion. 1 1 1 

infinite life, and the crucified Christ be- 
comes the crowned Christ for us. Stand- 
ing then in Christ, our eyes open on the 
vastness of God, and we see the ideal 
beauty and glory of every created form. 
No longer doubting, we grasp the ideal 
for ourselves and for all about us, becom- 
ing in our measure the Christ for them 
and revealing them to themselves. 

But what of the historic Christ? Let 
us think of Him as the personal manifes- 
tation of the universal Deity in relation 
to this planet; the Soul of the whole 
earth ; the Eternal Word which embodied 
God's thought of this world and its des- 
tinies. It was then all Christ from the 
beginning, both the mass of matter, and 
the possibilities of spiritual life to be 
evolved therefrom. Christ, the soul of 
mankind, was the forming principle, but 
was not manifested or individualized; just 
as when a child is born, his soul is the 
principle which forms him and determines 



H2 What shall Make us Whole? 

his aspect and his destinies, and yet it is 
long before he comes to himself and learns 
to rule by his soul, and bring his body 
into subjection. So the world waited long, 
and the struggle was fierce, with here and 
there a piling up of monstrous evil, and 
here and there a foreshadowing of the 
spiritual birth to come, till the day dawned 
when out of the lowest came the highest, 
and from a manger the first perfect Man 
arose and reached to Heaven. Then the 
soul of mankind was freed, and the way 
opened to the Infinite. 

If this was what happened when Christ 
was born, we should expect to see, as 
indeed we find, the Soul of mankind, 
Christ Jesus, leading a perfect life, in 
which spirit, for the first time triumphant 
over matter, could move it at will. It was 
a perfect life in its obedience to God, but 
it was a maimed life so far as the flesh 
was concerned ; in other words, it was in- 
complete. Therefore it passed through 



Conclusion. 113 

the gates of death and became invisible 
to mortal eyes. But it has been growing 
ever since, and bringing human conditions 
more and more into harmony with itself. 
Centuries have been needed, and more 
may yet go by, before that life reaches 
its full growth and stature. Not till every 
human being realizes that he is part of 
the life of Christ, and that his fealty and 
that of all his fellows is the necessary 
condition of its completeness, will Christ 
return visibly to earth, shining from the 
east unto the west in the wide glory of a 
perfected humanity. In some hearts He 
already reigns supreme, and to their loy- 
alty is granted a vision of the joyous time 
to come when physical science shall bring 
as her tribute such a thorough comprehen- 
sion of material laws and conditions, that 
disease and accident shall be held at bay; 
when art and music shall scorn to paint 
and sing anything less than the higher 
harmonies ; when every human being shall 
8 



U4 What shall Make us Whole? 

respect his own individuality as divine, and 
his body as a temple of the Holy Ghost, 
and yet shall be so conscious of his vital 
relation to all others in the great body of 
Christ, and so filled with loyal obedience 
to the Head, that his right shall never be 
allowed to work another's wrong. Then 
life shall flow in a full current through all 
the mighty form of the God-man, Christ 
Jesus. 

This day may be very far off, but its 
coming is certain; and while we wait we 
work for it and welcome every helpful 
influence. If in the search for health man 
finds that the Spirit of God can and does 
move matter when its power is invoked 
in accordance with the high and holy con- 
ditions it imposes, then there will come 
to him an ever-increasing confidence in 
that Spirit, and great discoveries will be 
made about the working of its laws. They 
will become so well understood a science, 
that we shall depend on them as simply 



Conclusion. 1 1 5 

as we now depend on the law of gravita- 
tion, and we shall handle the Bread of 
Life with as much naturalness as we now 
handle the daily bread upon our tables. 
Then will Christ keep His ancient promise, 
and drink the wine of His life new with 
us in the kingdom of God. 



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